Julio Frenk: Health's Bridge to Peace

The question is not whether globalization is changing the world, but how we keep pace
with it. On the health front, that means managing microbial traffic as well as lifestyles
and health products, services, and systems that travel from one country to the next.
The ultimate challenge, says Mexico’s Minister of Health, Julio Frenk,“is to build
a world order characterized by peace in the midst of diversity.” Frenk, who received
his M.P.H. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan School of Public Health,
believes that health itself may be central to our efforts to build such an order.
Frenk’s thoughts on globalization and health appeared in the winter 2006 issue of
Michigan Today, from which the following is excerpted.

"Instead of asserting one’s identity by rejecting or destroying what is different,
we must try to soften collisions, balance claims, and reach compromises. In this way,
we may try living according to what Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic,
has called a basic code of mutual coexistence.

Health may contribute to this pursuit because it involves those domains that unite
all human beings. It is there, in birth, in sickness, in recovery, and ultimately
in death that we can all find our common humanity. More today than ever, health is
a bridge to peace, a common ground, a source of shared security.

But for this to happen, we must renew international cooperation for health. I suggest
three key elements for such renewal, three “e’s”: exchange, evidence, and empathy.

Health systems around the world are facing similar challenges. The communications
revolution provides the opportunity to exchange information about these challenges
and about the initiatives to deal with them.

To be informative, such exchange should be based on sound evidence about alternatives,
so that we may build a solid knowledge base of what really works, which may be transferred
across countries when its culturally, politically, and financially reasonable.

But there is another value. The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin proposed the comparative
study of other cultures as an antidote against intolerance, stereotypes, and the dangerous
delusion by individuals, tribes, states, ideologies or religions of being the sole
possessors of truth. And this leads us to the third element, empathy, that human characteristic
which allows us to emotionally participate in a foreign reality, understand it, relate
to it and, in the end, value the core elements that make us all members of the human
race.

As we engage in the process of renewal, we would do well to remember the words of
a universal person, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote: “It really boils down to
this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects
all indirectly.”

Let us continue to weave together the destiny of better health for all the inhabitants
of our common world."

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"It is there, in birth, in sickness, in recovery, and ultimately in death that we
can all find our common humanity."